PTS Update 33 - Feedback Thread for Account Wide Achievements

PeacefulAnarchy

Araneae6537 wrote: »

One of the few things I would have liked about account-wide achievements is not having to accumulate x kills of y all on one character, but if I am reading the patch notes correctly, this does nothing to enable earning an achievement across multiple characters,

It does. All progress is accountwide.

Tandor

Dojohoda wrote: »

I think account wide achievements are for server resources. I need to read the comments to see if anyone else is thinks the same.

My feedback is that I don't like it. I like developing my individual characters. I like getting achievements on each of the characters. I like achievement pop-ups. Sometimes when I don't know what to do, I look at the achievements and figure out something for that particular character. :thumbsdown:

This is the first time I recall seeing that suggestion, and I've read the main threads on this fully. You may be right or you may be wrong, but certainly the idea that when half the players want one thing and the other half want a different thing the developers would opt for the one that most benefits the elephant in the room, namely server performance, is not an unreasonable one.

However, what the developers may not have fully realised is that there's no evidence that those wanting account-wide achievements and titles play less or leave the game over it, they simply carry on playing their main, while it's pretty clear that a lot of players feel that they would not have the same purpose or enjoyment in playing multiple characters with account-wide achievements and titles as they get with character-specific achievements and titles, and as that is their preferred way of playing the game it would inevitable lead to at best them spending less time in the game and at worst leaving it. So it's about a lot more than server performance!

I suspect I'm known by some as being otherwise very supportive and defensive of the game and its developers, but even I am seriously considering what to do if this change goes through on a non-optional basis. One idea I'm considering is dropping my two existing accounts with 50 characters across both regional servers and buying a cheap account on sale and rolling a single character on each server so that I can level them up as I wish and without what one does impacting on the other. I'd opt in that situation for a single monthly subscription rather than two 6-monthly subscriptions, because my long-term confidence in the game would have taken a severe blow.

I honestly doubt that I would be alone, a lot of players are devastated by this sudden and unexplained change. Early indications are that the way it has been implemented meets our worst fears, it being non-optional and once one character has earned an achievement no other character gets any pop-up acknowledgement for earning it. For many who have hitherto played multiple characters through the game it becomes a single-character game, while the change appeals primarily to those whose additional characters are for testing builds or else being rushed to endgame, as well as the account-wide titles appealing to the more serious role-players although many supporters of account-wide achievements draw the line at account-wide titles.

Clearly this is only the first testing cycle for this change, and there is opportunity for the developers to read the feedback and either drop the change, make significant alterations to it, or make it optional. I hope they take the opportunity to do so.

Wolf_Eye

silvereyes wrote: »

Wolf_Eye wrote: »

Dojohoda wrote: »

Alliance War Achievements-
I made a new character on the PTS to see how this plays out.

• The character has all the titles from my most advanced Cyrodill character and I slotted Grand Overlord.
• The character did not get the 50 skill points from the achievements.
• The character did not get the 5 Star image that goes with the title.
• I could not test anything else at this point because the character cannot go into Cyrodiil because it is under level 10. I'm going to take a guess that it can buy the scroll from the housing vendor. I want to add that being able to buy achievement items on a different character is not important to me.

Edit: (Adding to say that what I have looked at so far, the Alliance War Achievements, is pointless.)

On housing, I stepped into my main house on the new character and no achievement notifications popped up at all. This is unusual as this house typically gives several achievement on first entry to one of my characters. I must say that I like achievement pop-ups and I hope they were not removed as part of this new feature.

Interesting. So does this mean that any toons who did not do the PVP achievements before the update drops will be permanently locked out of those 50 skill points? That's....not good. Definitely a downside, and I say this as someone who did want account wide achievements.

No. Skill points are awarded by rank. When the character achieves the new rank by gaining AP, they will get the skill points.

It's confusing, because the achievements, titles, ranks and skill points all got awarded at the same time in the past, but now, the achievements and titles will only be awarded once, account-wide, and the ranks and skill points will continue to function as before, per-character.

Ahhh gotcha. Thank you so much for taking the time to explain.

I still can't say I'm completely happy with how this was implemented, in spite of looking forward to this, but at least we avoided a situation where a whole 50 skill points were now denied to our toons. Which would have been a whole 'nother disaster on a catastrophic level.

Even they wanted to save space on their drives, surely making character specific achievements viewable is possible client side? Seeing how it's been implemented with my own two eyes, I have some serious reservations on the difficulties of keeping track of things....

Araneae6537

Why couldn’t there just be an additional accountwide level tracking of achievements as currently provided by some PC add-ons? With titles I don’t have strong feelings one way or the other, but the achievements themselves are a nice acknowledgment of success and record of character progression. What is gained by making this accountwide??? Other than the titles, I don’t see any benefits to players. Maybe it’s to free up the database? Else I can’t imagine why it’s being implemented this way.

honglatongla

Just add all character names that have earned the respective achievement to the "earned by" section of the popup.

silvereyes

PeacefulAnarchy wrote: »

Araneae6537 wrote: »

One of the few things I would have liked about account-wide achievements is not having to accumulate x kills of y all on one character, but if I am reading the patch notes correctly, this does nothing to enable earning an achievement across multiple characters,

It does. All progress is accountwide.

Yes, kill counts, gold counts, do X action Y number of times counts ... they are all accumulated account-wide now.

Unfortunately, the "Earned by" date and credit only goes to the character that crosses the finish line on the achievement first. This can lead to some unfortunate side effects, like characters that hardly contribute to the total getting credit for the achievement.

For example, here is one of my alts, Sylver Diean, on live, and her progression towards Illicit Entrepreneur:


She's done almost none of the work, but she gets credit on PTS just because her character just happened to be the character that caused the accumulated fenced gold on that achievement to cross the 100,000 mark when her character loaded.


This is like those group projects where one kid hardly does any of the work, but instead of just getting the same grade as everyone else, they get the A+ and everyone else in the group gets an F.

Elsonso

Tandor wrote: »

Clearly this is only the first testing cycle for this change, and there is opportunity for the developers to read the feedback and either drop the change, make significant alterations to it, or make it optional. I hope they take the opportunity to do so.

I can remember one, and only one, time when they dropped something big like this on PTS and backed down before it released. Thirty-Two Updates. One time. So, as far as my memory goes... when ZOS decides they are going to do something like this, they push forward.

They might make changes to it, but I am really not seeing what they will do that will make much change. They aren't going to do an option, and there won't be a way to opt-in or out. This is not that sort of a feature. This is all in or go home. To change it, I think they will have to do significant re-design, and there is only 5 weeks. That is barely enough time to decide what to do.

So... Rather than pushing against this, which will be a wasted effort, it is probably wiser to decide how to move forward as a player. There is no hurry to decide, as this won't release until March.

wolfie1.0.

Tandor wrote: »

Dojohoda wrote: »

I think account wide achievements are for server resources. I need to read the comments to see if anyone else is thinks the same.

My feedback is that I don't like it. I like developing my individual characters. I like getting achievements on each of the characters. I like achievement pop-ups. Sometimes when I don't know what to do, I look at the achievements and figure out something for that particular character. :thumbsdown:

This is the first time I recall seeing that suggestion, and I've read the main threads on this fully. You may be right or you may be wrong, but certainly the idea that when half the players want one thing and the other half want a different thing the developers would opt for the one that most benefits the elephant in the room, namely server performance, is not an unreasonable one.

However, what the developers may not have fully realised is that there's no evidence that those wanting account-wide achievements and titles play less or leave the game over it, they simply carry on playing their main, while it's pretty clear that a lot of players feel that they would not have the same purpose or enjoyment in playing multiple characters with account-wide achievements and titles as they get with character-specific achievements and titles, and as that is their preferred way of playing the game it would inevitable lead to at best them spending less time in the game and at worst leaving it. So it's about a lot more than server performance!

I suspect I'm known by some as being otherwise very supportive and defensive of the game and its developers, but even I am seriously considering what to do if this change goes through on a non-optional basis. One idea I'm considering is dropping my two existing accounts with 50 characters across both regional servers and buying a cheap account on sale and rolling a single character on each server so that I can level them up as I wish and without what one does impacting on the other. I'd opt in that situation for a single monthly subscription rather than two 6-monthly subscriptions, because my long-term confidence in the game would have taken a severe blow.

I honestly doubt that I would be alone, a lot of players are devastated by this sudden and unexplained change. Early indications are that the way it has been implemented meets our worst fears, it being non-optional and once one character has earned an achievement no other character gets any pop-up acknowledgement for earning it. For many who have hitherto played multiple characters through the game it becomes a single-character game, while the change appeals primarily to those whose additional characters are for testing builds or else being rushed to endgame, as well as the account-wide titles appealing to the more serious role-players although many supporters of account-wide achievements draw the line at account-wide titles.

Clearly this is only the first testing cycle for this change, and there is opportunity for the developers to read the feedback and either drop the change, make significant alterations to it, or make it optional. I hope they take the opportunity to do so.

I could accept the server load argument IF ZOS were not also adding a whole new mini game to those same servers in a few months. They also dedicated resources to Housing Optimization to reduce server strain. they could have easily done the same here. I really doubt that. I would need ZOS to actually state this is the case.

gresiac

This is so *** for players that want to reply content, I’m alrdy thinking to move on to another game. What’s the point, another world of Warcraft stupid system.

wolfie1.0.

Just curious.. but with these changes would it even be possible for an addon to track this information? or am i dreaming?

willymancer69

wolfie1.0. wrote: »

Just curious.. but with these changes would it even be possible for an addon to track this information? or am i dreaming?

Add-ons work by getachievement() commands. But because achievements are now guaranteed on every toon if you've gotten them on one, this implementation by ZoS breaks all of those add-ons.

The reason the PTS update was so massive is that on the PTS the new achievement architecture no longer has any distinction/ memory / history of having accomplished an achievement if another toon accomplished it earlier. It erased years of achievements and dates for people.

Tandor

Elsonso wrote: »

Tandor wrote: »

Clearly this is only the first testing cycle for this change, and there is opportunity for the developers to read the feedback and either drop the change, make significant alterations to it, or make it optional. I hope they take the opportunity to do so.

I can remember one, and only one, time when they dropped something big like this on PTS and backed down before it released. Thirty-Two Updates. One time. So, as far as my memory goes... when ZOS decides they are going to do something like this, they push forward.

They might make changes to it, but I am really not seeing what they will do that will make much change. They aren't going to do an option, and there won't be a way to opt-in or out. This is not that sort of a feature. This is all in or go home. To change it, I think they will have to do significant re-design, and there is only 5 weeks. That is barely enough time to decide what to do.

So... Rather than pushing against this, which will be a wasted effort, it is probably wiser to decide how to move forward as a player. There is no hurry to decide, as this won't release until March.

That pre-supposes that it is more important to get this done in this Update than to get it done right. Actually, there is no practical or other reason why they could not pause this change until a later Update if they see the degree of hostility to it and recognise the need to work further on it, not least bearing in mind that no-one expected this change and everyone was surprised by it. There is no urgency to it whatsoever. A decision to pause it while they worked on it would satisfy those who want it that it was still happening, while reassuring those who don't want it that their concerns were acknowledged and being addressed.

SeaUnicorn

Did you notice any achievements were missed or didn’t get captured the way you expected? Everything seems to be in place
Did you find your current Motif and Enchantment knowledge? Yes
Did you still have all your previously earned titles? Yes titles seem to be there, did not check every single one, but the more noticeable ones are there.
Is it clear which achievements are still character-centered? Not sure about this one, I just see character name who get achieve 1st on the achieve.
Do you have any other general feedback?
Content replayability is getting impacted by account wide achievements for trials/dungeons. A lot of players were motivated to go for 2nds to get title on alternative toon. Since there is not tracking how many times or on which toons they got the achievement - it is less motivation for them to redo the content. And it has a lasting impact on the end game raiding community because pool of the players that you can recruit for a trifecta progression few patches after the release of the trial is much smaller, as people who already have it are less likely to join. Some sort of tracking such as how many time you got it or list of toon names or something else entirely would be great to motivate people to go for repeats.

Some incentive ideas:
- rare style pages that only drop with completion of trifecta
- collectible components akin to event fragments
- some incentive to improve score - so that people go for higher scores rather than trifecta repeitions

Elsonso

Tandor wrote: »

Elsonso wrote: »

Tandor wrote: »

Clearly this is only the first testing cycle for this change, and there is opportunity for the developers to read the feedback and either drop the change, make significant alterations to it, or make it optional. I hope they take the opportunity to do so.

I can remember one, and only one, time when they dropped something big like this on PTS and backed down before it released. Thirty-Two Updates. One time. So, as far as my memory goes... when ZOS decides they are going to do something like this, they push forward.

They might make changes to it, but I am really not seeing what they will do that will make much change. They aren't going to do an option, and there won't be a way to opt-in or out. This is not that sort of a feature. This is all in or go home. To change it, I think they will have to do significant re-design, and there is only 5 weeks. That is barely enough time to decide what to do.

So... Rather than pushing against this, which will be a wasted effort, it is probably wiser to decide how to move forward as a player. There is no hurry to decide, as this won't release until March.

That pre-supposes that it is more important to get this done in this Update than to get it done right. Actually, there is no practical or other reason why they could not pause this change until a later Update if they see the degree of hostility to it and recognise the need to work further on it, not least bearing in mind that no-one expected this change and everyone was surprised by it. There is no urgency to it whatsoever. A decision to pause it while they worked on it would satisfy those who want it that it was still happening, while reassuring those who don't want it that their concerns were acknowledged and being addressed.

You might be right that this is urgently needed because of some back end thing. It has a lot of signs that it was rather quickly assembled. That sort of thing does tend to go hand in hand with some manner of internal urgency or panic.

I mean, we are talking about the studio that won't make certain changes to housing because they are afraid they would break what players have done in there, or who won't change the appearance of a costume or armor because the last time they did it people had a fit. This is something considerably more impactful than changing an outfit, so maybe that lends to the idea that they are in a panic of some sort and this is the answer.

colossalvoids

I can surely get over it and get longer term benefits even but I'd surely love the option to have character progression somewhere also. Might have nothing to do with achievement points but an "on char" window of their personal progress, making able for gained account wide achievements to pop up again. For example getting a flawless conqueror on a fresh levelled toon, those moments are the real satisfaction factor for me personally. And it's not going against account wide thingie in a slightest, just enhancing it.

Mycroftz

IMO tracking achievements on an account wide level is fine, so that you can have the flexibility to go after different achievements on different toons and still have it count towards the 49k achievement points or whatever that are available in the game. This will allow those who are achievement hunters and completionists to still complete everything on either an account wide level or character level.

However, I don’t think that achievements should be populated across all characters like many have said, specifically in regards to titles. Veteran content titles in trials/dungeons/arenas, particularly trifectas, are some of the most coveted and hardest titles to achieve in game. You shouldn’t be able to wear a title achieved on a Dps on your tank or healer or level 1 new toon. It makes those titles less prestigious, and de-incentivizes achieving them on multiple classes or roles. It takes away the fun of what many people enjoy in this game. Those who roleplay will probably share the same feeling with their GMC or Master Angler title, as will those who have achieved Emperor status. Each character, class, role requires something different when it comes to these achievements, therefore those should not be accessible account wide. Enough things already are (such as skins).

There is currently no need for titles to be account wide. If there is, then veteran content and pvp content should not be included in that. Just as you’re able to prevent paid things from being included (like skyshards, etc), you should also be able to keep other categories out of it.

The_Jster

This has me really excited! I can finally give my characters fitting titles from the mass collection I have obtained on my main achievement hunting character. Being able to play however I want and make progress is a great feeling for me. Being able to replay content like Icereach on an alt and not having to worry about regretting that giant achievement is great. I finally feel like I have more choice with what I want to do when replaying content, whether it's replaying the stuff I love or ignoring the side content that I did not enjoy grinding. Looking forward to this on live at this current point in time

willymancer69

In seriousness, those not pictured are anyone who looks forward to investing in prestigious achievements (Master Angler, Master Crafter, etc)

wolfie1.0.

willymancer69 wrote: »

wolfie1.0. wrote: »

Just curious.. but with these changes would it even be possible for an addon to track this information? or am i dreaming?

Add-ons work by getachievement() commands. But because achievements are now guaranteed on every toon if you've gotten them on one, this implementation by ZoS breaks all of those add-ons.

The reason the PTS update was so massive is that on the PTS the new achievement architecture no longer has any distinction/ memory / history of having accomplished an achievement if another toon accomplished it earlier. It erased years of achievements and dates for people.

Thanks. So I can't even addon my way out of this

Araneae6537

silvereyes wrote: »

PeacefulAnarchy wrote: »

Araneae6537 wrote: »

One of the few things I would have liked about account-wide achievements is not having to accumulate x kills of y all on one character, but if I am reading the patch notes correctly, this does nothing to enable earning an achievement across multiple characters,

It does. All progress is accountwide.

Yes, kill counts, gold counts, do X action Y number of times counts ... they are all accumulated account-wide now.

Unfortunately, the "Earned by" date and credit only goes to the character that crosses the finish line on the achievement first. This can lead to some unfortunate side effects, like characters that hardly contribute to the total getting credit for the achievement.

For example, here is one of my alts, Sylver Diean, on live, and her progression towards Illicit Entrepreneur:


She's done almost none of the work, but she gets credit on PTS just because her character just happened to be the character that caused the accumulated fenced gold on that achievement to cross the 100,000 mark when her character loaded.


This is like those group projects where one kid hardly does any of the work, but instead of just getting the same grade as everyone else, they get the A+ and everyone else in the group gets an F.

Thank you for the clarification! I would rather achievements remain as they are, but if any are going to be made accountwide, I’m glad I’ll finally get the dyes unlocked behind these grindy ones.

silvereyes

wolfie1.0. wrote: »

willymancer69 wrote: »

wolfie1.0. wrote: »

Just curious.. but with these changes would it even be possible for an addon to track this information? or am i dreaming?

Add-ons work by getachievement() commands. But because achievements are now guaranteed on every toon if you've gotten them on one, this implementation by ZoS breaks all of those add-ons.

The reason the PTS update was so massive is that on the PTS the new achievement architecture no longer has any distinction/ memory / history of having accomplished an achievement if another toon accomplished it earlier. It erased years of achievements and dates for people.

Thanks. So I can't even addon my way out of this

Not practically. It may be theoretically possible ... if the addon backed up all character achievements from before update 33 ... and if the addon was able to somehow detect when achievements should have their character specific progress incremented - which the game may no longer raise achievement events for, so the addon would need to be incredibly smart about what the achievement conditions are and how to track them using non-achievement-based events.

In all, it sounds like a nightmare to implement and probably wouldn't benefit too many people. It would also be susceptible to crashes wiping out achievement data, or having the addon disabled or broken not tracking data.

So yeah, don't hold your breath for an addon fix.

silvereyes

Araneae6537 wrote: »

silvereyes wrote: »

PeacefulAnarchy wrote: »

Araneae6537 wrote: »

One of the few things I would have liked about account-wide achievements is not having to accumulate x kills of y all on one character, but if I am reading the patch notes correctly, this does nothing to enable earning an achievement across multiple characters,

It does. All progress is accountwide.

Yes, kill counts, gold counts, do X action Y number of times counts ... they are all accumulated account-wide now.

Unfortunately, the "Earned by" date and credit only goes to the character that crosses the finish line on the achievement first. This can lead to some unfortunate side effects, like characters that hardly contribute to the total getting credit for the achievement.

For example, here is one of my alts, Sylver Diean, on live, and her progression towards Illicit Entrepreneur:


She's done almost none of the work, but she gets credit on PTS just because her character just happened to be the character that caused the accumulated fenced gold on that achievement to cross the 100,000 mark when her character loaded.


This is like those group projects where one kid hardly does any of the work, but instead of just getting the same grade as everyone else, they get the A+ and everyone else in the group gets an F.

Thank you for the clarification! I would rather achievements remain as they are, but if any are going to be made accountwide, I’m glad I’ll finally get the dyes unlocked behind these grindy ones.

Except that specific one is bugged and can't be unlocked. Not sure about others.

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/comment/7509404/#Comment_7509404

R.I.P.

guarstompemoji

Loving this change and watching as the bugs are worked through.Out of every guild I am in, only one person was regretful. Everyone else could not wait, so thank you for doing this.

silvereyes

PeacefulAnarchy wrote: »

silvereyes wrote: »

I would also like to note that achievements now have an "earned by" note in their tooltips, but it seems to completely depend on the first character that you choose to load that has the achievement.


I definitely do NOT like this. The order that one loads characters in should NOT make irreversible, account-wide choices on the player's behalf.

Thanks for posting this, I was trying to figure out if that was the case. They really should be able to check on first load "is the date on this character before the already noted one? if yes, replace, if not keep."

It does appear to be working that way for some achievements, at least.

BronzeCaiman

This change is one of the best ones in years, newer players will actually be able to fill out that achievement book realistically now and won't look at it like a lost cause. And with the hybridisation changes we are getting as well, this game is feeling more like and Elder Scrolls game than ever.

The main thing I think this improves is getting rid of players who sell achievements, farm runs, trifectas, even emperor is sold by endgame communities. They could carry people for free out of the kindness of their heart, but where is the profit in that?

I do want spellcrafting, but I love card games. I honestly wanted a multiplayer minigame system for a long time, so I'm glad the team delivered. Playing against my wife with some stakes will be fun

willymancer69

[Snip]

But could you refill that achievement book on a second character with any reward?

A change that ostracizes a good portion of your community isn't a good one, especially when solutions exist that don't require a DB restructure.
To say one side is wrong without being able to empathize with them isn't helpful.

[Snipped for Baiting]

Shnax

I like the idea of having account wide achievements, but it should be on top of the character achievements not as a replacement. There has to be at least some kind of tracking per character. The absolute minimum should be to get the notification when a character completes an achievement individually and have it displayed in the achievement tab.

The way this is done removes a lot of replayability from the game. There is much less of an incentive to run vet dungeons or raids on multiple characters.

I don't mind having all titles available on all characters. It is my decision which ones I equip after all. I still think it devalues titles to a degree, but that does not hurt my own experience too much.

SerafinaWaterstar

Please please rethink this.

It seems rushed and ill-considered.

Why are quest achievements shared?
Why holiday event ones?
Why dungeon & trial ones?
Why pvp?!

Do you actually want people to replay the game? Why on earth can a character have completed all the achievements of an area *they have never set foot in*? Get Master Angler on one that has never fished?

Bloody ridiculous.

I’ve been playing for over 6 years & my main has done nearly everything. So what is the bloody point of playing my other 17 characters, when the progress they made through the game was recorded through the achievement tab - which will now be useless due to it all being filled in.

Utterly messed up the game. Well done.

At least consider it being optional or tabbed. Please don’t let this go live.

DeathStalker

Love the change but would be nice to try to include others by making it optional

Amottica

Just downloaded the PTS and I like it. I think it is great for the game.

Granted, I would prefer to see both account-wide and character-specific achievements but I figure that would increase server load at a time when we want to decrease it.

Thanks Zenimax.